Gallery: Psyche and Imagination

"To paint what we see before us is a different art from painting what we see within ."
- C G Jung ( CW 16, p.102)

Collected works from the Greenwich Conference Art Exhibition, July, 2006

As a group we’re conversing with psyche and imagination using different media, in different ways. Our art still has to struggle to be authentic and original. It needs to converse with older images with wit and imagination. I believe, as a group, we have managed to achieve all this. We are each approaching the theme of Psyche and Imagination with absolute uniqueness, but we share a common aim – to demarcate the beauty of psyche imagining walking the paths of individuation with you, its viewer. We are also in a dialogue with Jung’s ideas about creativity and psychic transformation. We are aware that making art can be scary, and it doesn’t always come out…you have to be pretty determined to engage in such an act and to stand by the results. These artists have worked hard to produce works that engage the ideas we’ll be celebrating this weekend.
- Rachael Steel, Curator

Bettina Reiber - Abstract Oil on Wooden Panel

The actual images grow from my imagination. I play with composition, color harmonies, and the translucency and brilliance of oil paint. In a process that lasts months new images appear and disappear on the surfaces until finally a point is reached where I feel a painting has come into its own, has come to life.

Bettina Reiber is a practicing artist and curator. She regularly shows in the UK and abroad. Her work is held in private and public collections. She teaches at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. She is a member of IAJS and a number of other academic research groups and she is currently completing her MA ‘Aesthetics and Art Theory’ (Philosophy) at Middlesex University where she received the Chancellor’s Scholarship for Academic Achievement.

Bettina Reiber | Rachael Steel | Michael Glock | Maria Tavernas

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Bettina Reiber | Rachael Steel | Michael Glock | Maria Tavernas

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Bettina Reiber | Rachael Steel | Michael Glock | Maria Tavernas

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Maria Tavernas - Bronze Sculpture
"Emergence of the Winged Serpent"	"The Serpent Woman"
For the last few years, I have been working on a series of sculptures that derive from a series of dreams that I had after I visited the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich the early1990s. Jung was in the first dream, and I was lying on a couch in the consulting room. I was telling him that I didn’t understand why I had such a profusion of serpents coming out of my mouth. I was shocked that I had so many inside me. They were emerging from a very deep part of me. Jung was saying, “Well, this is very interesting.” It was as if he understood the phenomenon and was validating my experience, that it was not odd or absurd, that it was archetypally human. It seemed that Jung wanted to reassure me that it was natural for all of these serpents to come out. They were not supposed to live inside me. I understood that I was giving them life and that all of these serpents were images of creativity. Eventually, in another dream…the upper part of my body was a woman, but the lower part of my body was a serpent. I regard my “dream art” as an example of what Susan Rowland calls the ‘feminist revision’ in Jungian Studies. Maria Taveras, L.C.S.W., is a psychoanalyst in training at the C.G. Jung Institute of New York and an award-winning sculptor of ‘dream art.’ Her sculpture Transformation of the Feminine received a 2004 Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, and her sculptures Emergence of the Winged Serpent and Serpent-Woman were exhibited in the juried Dream Art Show at the 2005 conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. Bettina Reiber | Rachael Steel | Michael Glock | Maria Tavernas